When the Giants used their first-round pick in the 2017 draft to select tight end Evan Engram, Mark Bavaro had one response: It’s about time.

Bavaro, arguably the greatest tight end in Giants history, wondered why it had taken so long for the organization to use a high draft pick on a tight end.

“The way the game is today, you need a big pass-catching tight end, a guy who can run like a wide receiver,” Bavaro told The Post on Monday during a charity golf event for the Ottis Anderson Scholarship Foundation in West Orange, N.J. “That’s the way the game is. But for some reason they wouldn’t get anybody.”

Engram is the first tight end the Giants have drafted in the first round since Jeremy Shockey in 2002. Since then, they have tried to fill the position with free agents and late-round draft picks. None of it really has worked.

“I don’t know why they had that philosophy,” said Bavaro, who starred on the Giants’ 1986 and 1990 Super Bowl-winning teams. “That might have gone all the way back to me. A lot of people didn’t know who I was or didn’t expect anything of me. But there have been so many front-office changes I wouldn’t think they thought of anything like that.”